by Growing up, Katini Yamaoka sat next to her grandmother’s vanity and watched her spread rice extract, Tsubaki oil and seaweed on her spotless skin. He would scold each ingredient and say, “One day you will learn to use them.” “And you will continue to maintain the beautiful skin you have.” And that really stuck with me, “says Yamaoka. With that in mind, she launched a skin care brand that combines powerful herbal ingredients from the cultures that shape it.
“My mother is Japanese, my father is from Ghana and I grew up in Australia,” says Yamaoka. “In Australia, I was introduced to these amazing native plants and beauty secrets through my family and friends, and just amazing people in my life. I really wanted to share it with a range of facial oils.”
Face oils are hers – she has been using them since she was just two years old and knows how beneficial they can be for your skin. “This is my place and I know it very, very well,” he says. So he got the ingredients he loved, teamed up with experts, and created an elegant line of wild-harvested natural oils that was released (and sold out quickly) at Saks in February (don’t worry – you can still buy them below).
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Creating Katini Skin
During the day, Yamaoka is a singer and songwriter. “The pandemic stopped everything in every industry, but especially in music, nothing happened,” he says. This gave her space to focus on her other passion — skin care. “As I was coming up with these thoughts in 2020, I was introduced to an incredible organization called Black Progress Matters, which focuses on incubating and accelerating minority businesses,” says Yamaoka. “They were looking for someone to work with and the synergy worked perfectly.
Eventually, he managed to make this brand a reality. “I had all these ideas that I had recorded for years,” he says. “As I wanted the preparations and some herbs and ingredients I wanted to put in it to feel.” She worked with her mom, who knows Ayurveda and holistic medicine, her founding partner, Katherine Ragusa, and her sister, Alison Ragusa, a holistic health professional, to record formulas.
“We went through and we knew it had to be effective, but we also wanted the texture and the efficiency to be right,” says Yamaoka. “There are so many oils out there, and I’ve tried so many of them because I’m an oil fanatic, it was so important to get the composition where we could incorporate these magical ingredients.”
The oils
From there, the team came up with the brand’s top four products: Soleil Day Serum ($ 75), Celestial Night Serum ($ 85), Clarity Facial Oil ($ 95) and Collagen Facial Oil ($ 115). Serums are light oils that are meant to be essential to your daily routine. Clarity and collagen oils are more viscous and are intended to be used as needed to enhance your shape.
“Depending on how your skin feels at the moment, you can either mix [the clarity or collagen oil] either with serum or use them as a standalone, “says Yamaoka. She has dry to combination skin and says she often just uses a face spray with one of the four oils and says it all day long. When she’m feeling extremely dry, she will mix oils with her moisturizer or she will use one of the oils as the last step in her routine to lock in moisture.
“Facial oils are incredible for our skin because of course, our face needs oil to stay hydrated,” says Yamaoka. “The point is to find the right oil that suits you.”
Soleil Day Serum – $ 75.00
“Our Soleil Day Serum is made to be used during the day,” says Yamaoka. “It gets into your skin very quickly, has properties that help with air pollutants and does not feel viscous or oily when you apply it with makeup.” It is rich in vitamin C and includes quandong and lettuce oils to protect the skin from external factors, while apricot oil helps to restore and hydrate the skin.
Celestial Night Serum – $ 85.00
“Celestial Night is much thicker and really beautiful,” says Yamaoka. “You wake up and you are really plump and hydrated.” This is achieved with three deep moisturizing and full of ingredients — Kakadu plum, macadamia and baobab — which are full of anti-inflammatory ingredients to rejuvenate the skin.
Clarity face oil – $ 95.00
“I grew up with a kind of problem skin and I would have a lot of flaws and everything else. “I found that using some of the ingredients we used in Clarity Oil really helped me as a teenager,” she says. “If it’s around my period and my skin breaks out, or I feel tired and not getting enough sleep, Clarity oil is amazing for helping to remove any blemishes.”
This oil combines omega-rich seaweed extract to detoxify any skin irritations and / or blemishes along with sake kasu and tsubaki in combination that act as a natural glow formula to help scars, sunspots and sun spots skin.
Collagen facial oil – $ 115.00
“Collagen oil has vegan squalene and wheat germ, something my grandmother told me about,” says Yamaoka. I hate the use of the word anti-aging, because we all start getting older from the day we are born. It’s just like, more than this beautiful pick-me-up, this glow we sometimes need when we feel a little tired or when we do not feel like ourselves. “It also includes a South African honeysuckle to reduce length and depth of wrinkles caused by UV rays.
As wonderful as facial oils are for one person, skins warn that others may not tolerate them well. Michelle Henry, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in New York, notes that those with sensitive or acne-prone skin should use facial oils on their toes. And because these oils have a light (but wonderful!) Scent, those with fragrance sensitivities can benefit from having a patch test on their neck or inner hand before applying them anywhere.
Just keep in mind that everyone’s skin reacts differently to certain ingredients. For example, Yamaoka has a friend with eczema and very sensitive skin that always avoids oils. “I gave her Clarity Oil and said, ‘Look, if you ever decide to change your mind, this was really designed for sensitive skin and problem skin,'” she recalls. “Just recently, he came back to me and said, ‘I really can not believe it.’ I used Clarity Oil, and it was actually the only thing I could use that calmed my skin and really helped smooth it. the inflammation that was there. “
Look forward
Now that the first Katini Skin products are available worldwide, Yamaoka and its team are working to expand the brand. But the plan will always be to serve as a destination for facial oil.
“This is what makes us truly unique in the skin care market. We all know it is an oversaturated market, but I have not seen a company that really focuses on branding itself as the home of facial oils,” she says. “We have, in our innovation pipeline, a typical body oil on which we process and we will release a moisturizer that balances the pH of Katini Skin to also replenish all the oils. So, we” will definitely expand. But I really want to have this face oil space. “
As the brand grows, Yamaoka wants to stay focused on simplicity.
“We are a brand that focuses on beauty as simple,” he says. “We are not a brand that focuses on this 10-step skin care routine. It really has to do with finding the basics and what you need and using them to really enhance and enhance the beauty that already exists within you.
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